Education

About Eva

Eva Sapi is an internationally recognized expert in Lyme disease research. She is on the front lines of searching for a cure for a disease that the Centers for Disease Control say is the fastest- growing vector-borne disease in the United States.

She was the first to discover the presence of Borrelia biofilm in human infected skin tissue, a finding that was published in the European Journal of Microbiology & Immunology, an international peer-reviewed online journal, representing one of her 70 peer-reviewed scientific papers on Lyme disease. The director of the University’s Lyme Disease Research Program, Dr. Sapi has trained more than 90 graduate students in Lyme disease research.

Dr. Sapi’s current research, with James Goldman, a Columbia University professor of pathology and cell biology, centers on a case in which a woman received 16 years of antibiotic therapy and still died from Lyme disease. Their findings – published in Healthcare 2018 – supported her earlier discoveries that Borrelia can form biofilm, a protective layer around itself, making it extremely resistant to antibiotics.

Dr. Sapi and her students are continuing to study a recent breakthrough in which they found that liquid, whole-leaf stevia extract — not the powdered varieties that people most commonly use — have reduced the biofilm mass by about 40 percent.

The goal of her research is to ultimately identify novel antibacterial agents that are effective in killing all forms of Borrelia.

Recognized by Massachusetts General/Harvard Medical School for her Lyme disease research, Dr. Sapi was named a research trailblazer by LymeDisease.org in 2018. She’s shared her findings at conferences around the country and organized six Lyme Disease Symposiums at the University of New Haven, which regularly draw 200 participants, and she has received the Lyme Connection of Ridgefield’s Courage Award.

Dr. Sapi’s initial research focused on ovarian cancer. She shifted her focus to finding a better treatment for Lyme disease after contracting the disease herself. She did her post-doctoral training at Yale University’s School of Medicine and received her Ph.D. in genetics at Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest, Hungary.